Opposition groups plan for post Al Assad-era

Istanbul Emad Al Deen Al Rashid, a former assistant dean at the Islamic law college of Damascus University, opened his MacBook Air laptop and flipped through spreadsheets detailing the unmet needs of seemingly every besieged neighbourhood across Syria.

From his spare office in a fifth-floor walk-up on a drab Istanbul street, Al Rashid spends eight hours a day calling into Syria, mostly to lobby hundreds of his former theology students to join his new Syria National Movement, patiently building a network that he hopes will one day become the Islamist movement's power base.

While opposition groups are mostly concentrating on ending the brutish rule of President Bashar Al Assad, they are also positioning themselves for the longer-term question of who will rule in a post-Al Assad era. For that, they know from watching what happened in other Arab countries like Tunisia and Egypt that they need a good ground game.

"The Syrian people don't want to hear about politics right now, they want to focus on toppling the regime," Al Rashid, 47, an amiable man with a neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard, said. "But you have to be present politically before the system falls."

A broad spectrum of political organisations outside the country are jockeying for position, anticipating a new, democratic government in Syria for the first time since a 1963 military coup established the supremacy of the Baath Party and emasculated the rest.

Fractious groups

The jockeying has alienated many Syrians, particularly those inside, who complain that members of the fractious opposition exile group, the Syrian National Council, are fixated more on grabbing appointments that they can leverage into domestic influence later than on, than in forging the unity needed to defeat the government. The wrestling continues nonetheless. It remains unclear which group, if any, will emerge the dominant player.

Given the triumphant sweep of Islamist parties across North Africa, Syria's Islamist leaders itch with anticipation that this is their moment, too. The Muslim Brotherhood is the dominant actor, but two other Islamist organisations, The National Action Group and Al Rashid's Syria National Movement, are vying for influence. All are based abroad.

The Syrian branch of the Brotherhood faces obstacles that its counterpart in Egypt, for one, never encountered.

The Egyptian Brotherhood, while technically illegal, was tolerated by the government of Hosni Mubarak. In Syria, by contrast, the Brotherhood has almost no presence, thanks to a 1980 law stipulating the death penalty for membership in the group as well as long years of bloody repression. Most of its current leaders were young men when they fled the country 30 years ago after the government of Hafez Al Assad, the president's father, massacred at least 10,000 people in the central city of Hama.

"We don't have an organisation, but we have a constituency," Ali Sadreddin Al Bayanouni, the head of the Syrian Brotherhood from 1996 to 2010, said.

Its impact may be further diluted by internal divisions. Rivalry within the Muslim Brotherhood has long pitted its more tolerant Aleppo branch against the more conservative Hama branch. Exile widened those differences because many Aleppans went to the West, while the Hamawis moved to the Arabian Gulf.

None of this has stopped the group from trying to build a cohesive network. Al Bayanouni, the former leader, estimated the Brotherhood sent between $1 million (Dh3.67 million) to $2 million monthly into Syria for humanitarian needs.

Resurrecting network

Abu Anas, a 45-year-old mosque imam in a small village between Hama and Homs, said senior Brotherhood figures called from abroad to ask him to resurrect a network that his father once led.

"They want me to rebuild the Muslim Brotherhood's group through a charity network by helping poor families, jailed activists and by paying for medical aid," he said, estimating that the organisation spent millions of dollars in his region alone in the last year, adding: "If we could present good services and policies to all Syrians, we will be elected." All the Islamist groups agree this is not the time for pushing divisive social issues like banning alcohol or veiling women, and they acknowledge that internal squabbling only serves Al Assad's interests. The longer and more militarised the fight, they worry, the greater chance that radical jihadists will become the face and power of the resistance.

Uncertain future

The opposition has a plan to avoid that, Obaida Nahas, 36, a marketing executive and founding member of both the Syrian National Council and the National Action Group, said. He described it as the "four Ds": demonstrations, defence, defections and diplomacy. Yet, with chances of success murky, so is the future direction of Syrian politics.

Nahas and his allies say they are religious conservatives rather than Islamists, not unlike Turkey's governing party, which they call an inspiration but not a model. The age of ideology is dead, Nahas said, speaking in an interview in the lobby of a modest Istanbul hotel. Instead, he said, the generation that fomented the Arab Spring wants a limited, non-ideological state that treats all its citizens equally.

"We are trying to find common ground, something that would create a national identity that would include all political groups," Nahas said.